14 Books You Need to Read in January

From gripping short stories and moving memoirs to essential reads from the likes of Paul Auster, Roxane Gay and Ayelet Waldman, these are the works you won't want to miss in the new year.

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'Selection Day' by Aravind Adiga

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of White Tiger returns with another captivating novel about two brothers coming of age in the slums of Mumbai and negotiating their father's dream for them to become wealthy and powerful cricket stars with their own alternate ambitions, rivalries and self-discoveries.

The latest stories by the novelist and cultural critic behind An Untamed State and Bad Feminist mine a vast spectrum of contemporary female life, depicting women as wives and sisters and engineers and strippers, wealthy and poor, adulterous and monogamous, sexually free and mystically cursed with a plague of water damage. Gay's characters may grapple with familiar themes—including daddy issues, weight issues, jealousy, financial insecurity and sexual assault—but Gay's signature dry wit and piercing psychological depth make every story mesmerisingly unusual and simply unforgettable.

Each of the sixteen stories in Miller's glorious second collection is narrated by a unique female character grappling with the difficulties and disappointments of love and friendship, amidst added concerns such as body image troubles, having children and alcohol abuse. Miller's heroines make all the inevitable failures of young adulthood against Southern backdrops that range from a trailer park to an on-campus home of a college professor to a foster home for abandoned children, and it's a testament to the author's extraordinary knack for realism that each woman is as poignantly, sometimes painfully relatable as the last.

The acclaimed novelist and essayist, having long suffered from a mood disorder that has at times threatened to interfere with both her literary success and her family stability, goes in search of just that—"a really good day"—in this simultaneously humorous and methodically-researched account of the month she spent under the influence of LSD—in sub-therapeutic microdoses, that is. Over the course of her self-treatment, Waldman charts her experience and behavior every single day with the precision of a lab scientist and the charm and humanity of a gifted entertainer. The result is not just a powerful case for the introduction of hallucinogenic treatments into the mainstream medical practice, but an engaging account of one woman's personal and yet strikingly sympathetic attempt at navigating the highs (no pun intended) and lows of life as a writer, wife and mother.

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman, $26, indiebound.org on January 10.

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'Transit' by Rachel Cusk

The second book in a magnificent trilogy that began with 2014's Outline follows the same narrator Faye, an English writer and mother of two, who, still reeling from her recent divorce, picks up her children and moves to London in search of a fresh start. In prose mystifyingly stripped of emotion, Cusk plumbs the minefields of motherhood and suffering through a protagonist seeking to reconcile one with the other, as well as her twin urges to cling to and yet detach from her own life.

In Flint's debut crime novel, Ruth, a single working-class mother in 1960s Queens wakes up one morning to the horrifying discovery that her children have gone missing. When the deceased bodies of Cindy and Frankie are found that same day, Ruth is the prime suspect, but a young reporter is convinced there's more to the story. Inspired by true events, this thrilling suspense story will make you question your loyalties at every turn.

This debut novel written by and for the literary millennial explores the struggles of recent college graduates Evan and Julia to find success in all its forms—as a couple, as young professionals in Manhattan amidst an increasingly unstable financial environment post-recession and as individuals on the cusp of adulthood. Throughout her protagonists' trials and their often dramatic responses thereto, Pitoniak maintains her keen eye for the universal insecurities facing her generation today, from romantic uncertainties and the relative benefits and downsides of hedge fund and nonprofit jobs to the emotional effort it requires to negotiate the predetermined facts of one's upbringing with the person one chooses to become.

Twenty years ago, journalist Barbara Reynolds began interviewing the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., and those revelatory tapes have now become the definitive written account of the life of an influential, under-appreciated heroine of American history. From her ambitious upbringing in the Deep South and her loving marriage and tragic loss thereof, to her resilient assumption of her late husband's causes and the founding of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Coretta Scott King endured as one of the nation's great champions, through the trials of the civil rights era and beyond.

Set against the backdrop of 19th-century American wartime, the latest novel by the celebrated Irish novelist, poet, and playwright tells the story of Irish orphan Thomas McNulty and John Cole, the best friend he meets on the front lines of the Indian Wars in Missouri. Theirs is a tale of fierce determination to overcome the physical and mental tolls of battle by establishing a pseudo-family—they engage in a secret romance and take in a Sioux child, Winona, as their charge. As America itself transitions from the Indian Wars into the Civil War, the men's tenuous life together becomes increasingly threatened in a heartrending tale that balances gritty combat with sentimental, tortured love.

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, $26, indiebound.org on January 24.

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'The Signal Flame' by Andrew Krivak

Three generations of a Slovak-Catholic family living in rural Pennsylvania wrestle with the realities and legacies of war in the second novel by the National Book Award finalist behind The Sojourn. When the younger of two sons returns home from Vietnam after being reported missing, he finds his mother still mourning the loss of her Great War veteran father, while his older brother works with the fierce determination of postwar America to grow a new life literally out of the soil after the death of their own father, a disgraced WWII prisoner. The 20th-century narrative, told throughout in Krivak's singular, nuanced language, explores themes that profoundly resonate today.

The prolific, award-winning author behind The New York Trilogy and The Brooklyn Follies weaves a textured and sensational portrait of mid-20th-Century America through the coming-of-age of his protagonist, Archie Ferguson. The novel—Auster's first in seven years—is written in often impossibly elongated sentences and paragraphs, its physical and stylistic magnitude reflective of the rich thematic ground the author has undertaken to cover, from the political landscape (Archie lives through the post-WWII era that witnesses the rise of figures like President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.) to the literary-philosophical world Archie immerses himself within, including Voltaire to Theodore White. 4 3 2 1 will challenge you to keep up with its linguistic complexity and conceptual heft with every turn of its nearly 900 pages, but the magnetic plot and riveting cultural detail make it impossible to put down.

The former magazine editor and actress continues the memoir she began with 1997's Anything Your Little Heart Desires. Picking up where she left off in her stormy Los Angeles upbringing—plagued with her parents' alcoholism, infidelities, and neglect—Bosworth focuses this second installment primarily on her personal and professional development both onscreen as an actor and on the page as a writer. She lays bare both the highs and lows of her adult life, from her ill-fated marriage at 19, to getting an abortion just prior to co-starring with Audrey Hepburn in A Nun's Story, to both her father's and her brother's suicides, creating a sometimes harrowing, always complex, and deeply wrought portrait of one of today's preeminent contemporary cultural figures.

The Men in My Life: Love and Art in the 1950s by Patricia Bosworth, $28, indiebound.org on January 31.

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'How to Murder Your Life' by Cat Marnell

A former magazine beauty editor writes in unsparing detail about the alcohol and prescription drug addiction she kept secret from the high-powered and high-gloss worlds she occupied, from the elite Massachusetts private school of her adolescence to the tony hallways of publishing houses in adulthood. Her memoir brims with all the intoxicating intrigue of a thriller and yet all the sobering pathos of a gifted writer's true-life journey to recover her former health, happiness, ambitions and identity.

How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell, $27, indiebound.org on January 31.

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'A Season to Bee' by Carlos Aponte

A famed fashion illustrator takes chic children on a tour of nature's most coveted runways. Follow Miss V. McQueen and her cadre of stylish bugs as they parade their natural, colorful beauty before the world. A perfect entrée into the world of fashion for budding BAZAAR readers everywhere.

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